What interests me is the connection between design, ecology and everyday living, and how everything relates to the whole. Those ideas still feel incredibly relevant today.
Picard realizes that the highest application of intelligence is not to thwart your enemies, but to design a world in which you and they can live in mutually beneficial coexistence.
Why is this free event better run than any airline check-in counter, DMV, or preschool drop-off in the world? No pre-registration is needed. Results are immediately available.
4w ago
We have to distinguish between the perfection of the machine and the perfection of its product. The machine may be worn and imperfect, and yet its product may be of perfect quality. The imperfection of the organ does not necessarily imply the imperfection of its function.
1mo ago
It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we spend our lives praising the horse and forgetting to plant the field.
1mo ago
Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backwards. The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs overlap, problems frequently become easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse.
"When we say 'AI models went rogue,' we skip the entire story: the part where OpenAI manually removed the model's cybersecurity blocks. We skip that OpenAI chose to test it on a machine with a live network connection. If you see AI as a system from nowhere, you can make the claim that the model 'went rogue,' and that it 'broke containment,' both of which place agency and decision-making onto the model itself rather than the people who set the stage for that behavior. When you expand the boundary of the system to include the people building and deploying it, the case becomes much less science fiction and more like incompetence."
So for example, if we automate vulnerability finding without automating patching, we will shift the bottleneck from vulnerabilities to patching to remediation, and we will simply drown or inundate human software engineers in new vulnerabilities to fix and patch. This is not a problem whose end state we can solve partially.
When we say 'AI models went rogue,' we skip the entire story: the part where OpenAI manually removed the model's cybersecurity blocks. We skip that OpenAI chose to test it on a machine with a live network connection. When you expand the boundary of the system to include the people building and deploying it, the case becomes much less science fiction and more like incompetence.
When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe" — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.
3mo ago
The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.
Systems pushed too far in one direction eventually summon their opposite. Once I started looking at internet culture through that lens, I couldn't unsee what was coming.
5mo ago
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
I love sharing it with people to illustrate just how fragile the global economy is — because we have eliminated every redundancy in favor of efficiency, and the consequences are hiding in plain sight.
The global aviation industry would grind to a halt without them. All parts have to be certified and need a comprehensive maintenance history to retain value.
Any system has only a finite number of security vulnerabilities, so if we have new AI models that are good enough to comb over the code and fix the weak points very quickly, that should privilege the defense over the offense.
The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. "It's like the jaws of life," Cobb said. "If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut."
Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.
Industrial engineering is essentially the study of people and machines. [It's about] how the two working together can create things that they couldn't create on their own. I've always viewed the supply chain to be a bit of a piece of art when it was done correctly. Because it's a symphony of…1000s of different components and parts coming together to create something.
AI magnifies your strengths and weaknesses—if your deployment pipeline is broken or your code review process is manual chaos, AI will just help you ship broken code faster. Fix your fundamentals first, then pour gasoline on the fire.
A trap a lot of these kinds of research labs or hard tech labs fall into is they start with the technology first, build that in a vacuum, and then they try to figure out what use cases to try to fit it into later. Whenever that happens, it always feels like the product isn't quite the right fit.
The problem isn't that they lack ideas; it's that they try to prioritize fundamentally different kinds of systems as if they were the same thing. Treating architecturally different products as if they're in the same category makes effective prioritization nearly impossible.
When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.
I'm drawn to anything that peeks behind the curtain of power - both are fascinating takes on how the world really works, and help me to tune out a lot of the daily noise and negativity.
Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil.
Paul Collins began documenting deaths that occurred in clothing donation bins, whose designs are hostile and can be lethal, depending on the interaction.
What makes the one-time pad interesting isn't the math. It's that the limiting factor was always trust, logistics, and human error under pressure — the same things that compromise nearly every security system.
The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.
Every tree is a jazz player, in just this way, although where a long Coltrane piece might last a quarter hour, a tree's performance may go on for half a millennium or more.
Human overpopulation is not the only factor driving ecological overshoot, but it is the most neglected one, and the factor that intensifies every crisis confronting us. And it really should be one of the most important progressive issues given its patriarchal roots.
Working in Africa often means operating within ecosystems shaped by decades of entrenched thinking. Some of it is rooted in ignorance, others in racism, and most in systems historically designed to extract from the continent rather than build within it. Challenging those assumptions is rarely comfortable, but it is often necessary.
We have no long-term energy plan. We don't even seem to recognize the existence of a long-term problem. Rather, we simply vacillate from panic to complacency in response to short-term shortages and surpluses.
By the 1500s, the incredibly slight discrepancy between the actual length of the solar year (365.2422 days) and the average length of the Julian calendar year (365.25 days) had created some problems.
Although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.
After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.
